Poor retelling of Night of the Living Dead

Rating: Null/10 (22 July 2003)

As you can probably gather from the title above I didn't pretty much care for this film. I will admit it was scary at times but that is not enough to get over the fact that this film is a remake of Night of the Living Dead with bits of Dawn of the Dead(the sequel to the Night) added in too. In other words, with the exception of the characters and locations, everything about this film has been done before and on FILM if I may add. 28 Days Later wins the award for being the first feature film I've ever seen in a theater that was shot on a Canon XL-1. Not at a film festival or at a special screening but at just a regular average movie theater. Oops, I forgot Blair Witch, that is the only other one shot on such a low grade video that I have seen. The results were, for lack of a better term, bad. The depreciation in resolution was very apparent and so was the limitation of colors. I don't really understand why the film was shot that way. One would just assume that is was done for budgeting constraints but Danny Boyle is an established filmmaker who did such hits as Trainspotting and the Beach. Isn't he able to purchase film stock for his films by now. The film also had a couple of holes in it's story that made it even worse. First, why did the zombies or the "infected" go running after and attacking the humans. In Night of the Living Dead it was because they fed on the living or the just killed and in Return of the Living Dead they ate the brains to ease the pain of being dead but in this film it is never established. It's just assumed that because they did it in those other films why not in this one too. Second, is it possible for a bacteria or virus, which ever it was, to turn people into monsters in 20 or 30 seconds when no other infection on earth works that fast or nearly that fast. I know the film is fiction but that pushing the walls of suspension of disbelief a little too far. There was one other guy who wrote a review on the film here that stated that he liked the portrayal of how humans act under such an apocalyptic crisis. The part with the soldiers in the mansion. That pessimistic look at humanity was already covered in the film Dawn of the Dead. I guess this film was ultimately shot on video because no one really wanted to fund an underwritten remake of Night of the Living Dead.